Christy has fat to slim chance in 2016

The nattering chatterers are at it again. Here we are still three years away from picking our next president, and they’re already drooling all over our TV screens at the possibilities.

Cable-network talking heads are trained on 2016 like foxhounds headed for the hunt, trying to get us wound up over things that (a) won’t be happening for years, or (b) won’t happen ever.

One figure who looms large in these discussions is New Jersey Gov. Chris (“Crisco”) Christie, who, like the groundhog, saw his own shadow (how could he miss it?) and decided to lay low in last year’s election campaign and save his energy for a later time.

Frankly, I kind of hope he runs next time around. Not because I think he’d make a great president, although it would be fun to have someone so refreshingly candid in charge, but because he’s so very fat. You might say that Christie, as he’s presently constituted, would really put the POT in POTUS.

Our nation has become so obsessed with political correctness that fat people are getting to be the only group we still dare to kid around about. Well, Red Sox fans too, I suppose.

It may be significant that the governor recently underwent lap-band stomach surgery to control his weight, suggesting that he may look more like his potential rivals for the highest office three years from now, rather than the elephant in the room.

Even if that doesn’t work, he’d be unlikely, if elected, to be the country’s heaviest head honcho. Christie reportedly weighed in at just over 300 when he had his operation, but William Howard Taft at one point tipped the scales at a whopping 340.

Legends abound about Taft’s epic girth.

Once, when governor-general of the Philippines, he cabled the Secretary of War from Manila: “Took long horseback ride today. Feeling fine.” To which the Secretary is said to have replied: “How is the horse?”

When he visited the Panama Canal, his host carefully reinforced a dining room chair with steel. At the White House, an outsized bathtub had to be constructed for the new president’s ablutions.

On a visit to a Massachusetts beach, Taft wore a custom-made swim suit for a plunge into the North Shore waters. When a local resident suggested to a friend that they take a dip there too, the friend cracked, “Perhaps we’d better wait. The President is using the ocean.”

One wag called Taft the most chivalrous man in Washington because on streetcars he’d rise and offer his seats to three women. And so it went.

Fatty presidents are a bit out of vogue these days. Bill Clinton was the heaviest in my lifetime, topping off at 223. He’s much more svelte today, perhaps warming up and trimming down for a new career as First Gentleman.

At the other end of the scale was little James Madison, said to have come in at a spare 100 pounds on a frame of 5-feet-4. No lightweight though, he was the father of freedom of the press.

Good luck to Chris Christie. If not in winning the Oval Office, at least in losing some of that Crisco.